He holds the keys to Jacumba’s future

David Landman owns 220 acres of land in a remote desert town. Can he transform it into a place that people want to visit?

David Landman bought so much land in the surrounding area last year that he owns most of the town, which recently had a name change, to Jacumba Hot Springs. The town was a glitzy retreat for Hollywood’s film stars in the 1920s and ’30s, and Landman is on a mission to recapture that magic. Peggy Peattie • U-T photos

David Landman bought so much land in the surrounding area last year that he owns most of the town, which recently had a name change, to Jacumba Hot Springs. The town was a glitzy retreat for Hollywood’s film stars in the 1920s and ’30s, and Landman is on a mission to recapture that magic. Peggy Peattie • U-T photos

Strangers start waving at you. You get a feudal nickname you may not be totally comfortable with.

You’re faced with endless decisions: What to name the signature sandwich at the restaurant you’re renovating? Put in a clinic or a variety store? How to use all that land?

You have to get yourself a really big key ring.

David Landman’s is a carabiner with a cluster of keys hanging from it that’s larger than his fist. As he lifted it up on a recent afternoon, a key fell off. He picked it up and put it back. Another key dropped.

“I don’t know where all these go to. Not a clue. They just keep handing me keys,” Landman, 66, said. “All I know is that the square ones open the hotel doors. The silver ones open the front door. My construction people say, ‘Here. Here’s more keys.’ Some of these go to the buildings downtown.”

A year ago, David and Helen Landman bought 220 acres in Jacumba Hot Springs, a town in the high desert about 70 miles east of San Diego.

Jacumba Hot Springs is a nub of civilization — market, school, senior group, library — that pops up between stretches of highway in a pocket of the county where winds buffet the dusty hills and the U.S.-Mexico border fence is a hawk squawk away.

They don’t own the whole town, exactly, just the 30 or so parcels they purchased in March 2012 for almost $1.5 million. The sale included about 70 percent of the commercial properties on the main drag, Old Highway 80, Landman said. The key attractions were the rundown resort, a lake and the mineral spring, which gushes out at 102 degrees a quarter mile away.

The Landmans have experience reviving languishing vacation spots: In 1997 they bought a nearby RV park and turned it into a nudist resort, and for a few years they had shares in an Arizona resort.

After more than a year of work, the 24-room hotel in Jacumba Hot Springs, its restaurant and its two mineral-water pools and Jacuzzi will open by May 1, the Landmans hope.

The resort is just the beginning.

Developers have swept through Jacumba before, promising big things for the former railroad town that lost its pep, and the majority of its population, when Interstate 8 opened in the 1960s. Is this time any different?

Longtime Jacumba residents and newcomers said they’re confident in the Landmans because they have tourism know-how, a personal stake in their community and the money to do the job right.

“I wish him the best. I think he’s got the experience. I think he knows what he’s doing,” said Richard Anderson, 59, who moved to Jacumba about a year ago and drives a tow truck. He echoed the sentiments of other Jacumba residents.

Landman hopes they’re right. “I’ve never owned a town before!” he said. Because of his new status, some have started calling him the Duke of Jacumba.

Down the line, Landman envisions a hopping main street with jewelry shops and art studios, added amenities, and day-trippers from San Diego. But first he has to get the spa going, since that’s the anchor business in his master plan.

“It’s almost a reality,” he said. “I’m excited and terrified at the same time. How many people are going to show up?”

From labor to finance

“I’ve always been a builder of businesses,” Landman said on the hotel’s pine-tree shaded patio as his wife trained kitchen staff inside. He grew up in a small town south of Rochester, N.Y. The harsh winters eventually led him to Southern California and to this conclusion: “Snow is a four-letter word to me.”

Landman’s father died when he was 16 and his mother moved to Virginia, where she was from, “so I was on my own.” He moved into an apartment by himself. He started college but didn’t finish. “Life happened,” he said. “No money, got married, had other priorities.” David and Helen married when he was 19. She’s a year younger, and they have two daughters.

One lesson stayed with him from his college days: avoid a life of manual labor. “You know the little mailboxes at the post office? I made the lever that went back and forth to make the lock,” he said. “I still have the scars. … I didn’t want to do that the rest of my life. I knew that. I was not going to be a factory worker.”

Helen Landman said that rough start paved the way for their later success. “We (went) through the school of hard knocks. The best educator in the world, I think,” she said.

After college, Landman spent a few years in wholesale suit and sportcoat sales. That job brought the couple to Northern California, near Sacramento. Their first business venture was a small chain of lingerie shops in Danville. Then Landman got a mortgage banking job, where he worked closely with companies that were expanding their presence in specific regions.

In the mid-1990s, his bank “got bought by a big company that was bought by a bigger company,” and he decided to move on. He and his wife moved to Jacumba and opened the “clothing optional” DeAnza Springs Resort there in 1997. “We took an almost abandoned RV park and turned it into one of the top 10 resorts of its kind in the United States within two or three years.”

Running DeAnza prepared him for this venture. He learned to observe and cull ideas from hotels and restaurants all over the world. Recently he got an idea during dinner. “It was just a way to fold napkins. I took a picture. Knowing what you like — that’s a lot of it.” And he learned to get things done.

When he worried that the town’s name, Jacumba, was too abstract for outsiders to connect with, he changed it to Jacumba Hot Springs. The change became official in February. “I think the lifeblood of the community is the mineral water,” he said.

He concluded that empathy is key in hospitality. “I wouldn’t have motel rooms that I wouldn’t stay in; I wouldn’t have food that I wouldn’t eat.”

Ups and downs

Jacumba Hot Springs wasn’t always a “ghost town,” as residents sometimes refer to it. It used to be a glitzy retreat for Hollywood’s early film stars in the 1920s and 1930s. When Interstate 8 was completed in the 1960s, traffic through the town dropped and its decline began. The population shrank from 5,000 in its golden days to more than 500 today.

Since then, its revival has been in the works for about half a generation. A county library opened in 1997, and over time more artists moved to the area. A handful of residents formed a revitalization committee. That is its history — some ups, some downs — in a very small nutshell.

When residents learned that the owners of the spa and its surroundings were in arrears, they decided to hunt for a buyer.

Danielle and Howard Cook moved to Jacumba in 2010 after they retired — she from marketing, he from management consulting. Cook said her “very goal-oriented” husband spent months on the lookout, even approaching some people on the street to test their interest: “If they said they love the spa, they came there every year, he kind of probed the see if they’d be a good candidate.”

When that didn’t work, their thoughts drifted to the Landmans.

Landman, channeling a hint of Ralph Lauren with his crown of white hair and a black polo shirt, said that when a group of Jacumba residents pitched a unique deal — buy our town? — he bit for two reasons. One was “opportunity.” Using his real estate expertise, he was able to foreclose on the neglected property and negotiate a good deal. The other reason: “We like the people up here.” They’ve hired mostly “local or semi-local” people to work at the hotel, he added.

“People” is the reason Landman gave for why he’s a nudist. “It’s not necessarily the nudity; it’s the people that are there. In my opinion, it’s a nicer class of people that you meet. You really can’t be a butthead when you’re naked. There’s nothing to hide behind.”

Some in town call him “the nude guy,” Helen Landman said. “Not that he comes down here nude, but that’s the reputation. There’s a few, I’m sure, that are apprehensive, but I think they can see we’ve worked our tails off. … Those who have a vested interest in town are pleased.”

And then there’s the moniker the Duke of Jacumba, but it isn’t going to his head: “It’s all ‘Dave.’ I won’t be called anything but.” No one knows exactly who started it, but so far it has stuck like mineral mud.

County Supervisor Dianne Jacob said it’s about time somebody recognized Jacumba’s potential.

“I’ve always looked at Jacumba as a sleeping dog waiting to be awakened if someone had the vision and the tenacity to want to make use of those hot springs and rebuild the area to what it once was,” she said. “The people in the community are really excited. They’d love to see some major changes.”

After the hotel opens, the Landmans will build a day spa and perhaps offer mineral mud treatments, like Glen Ivy in Corona. Also on the list: fix up a park, pump water back into the dessicated lake, and use their real estate and business development experience to coax retailers back to town.

“If you dream big and shoot for the moon, you’re going to end up being a star somewhere, whether you miss or not,” Helen Landman said.

From his big, white Chevy Avalanche — his fourth — Landman drove up and down Old Highway 80 and pointed out his property line. “I actually own from those trees on this side,” he said, glancing at some trees halfway to the horizon, “all the way down to the other end of town.”

As he drove past an old, burned down hotel and the mineral spring source that will feed the renovated spa and all the empty storefronts whose destiny is in his hands, people up and down the street waved. Some he knew; some he didn’t. He waved back to all of them.